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Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #38, Fall 1993
ESSAYS
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The Revolution of Everyday Life
Chapter 17
by Raoul Vaneigem
SURVIVAL SICKNESS
Survival and false opposition to it
Survival is life reduced to economic imperatives. In the present
period, therefore, survival is life reduced to what can be consumed
(seventeen). Reality is giving answers to the problem of
transcendence before our so-called revolutionaries have even
thought of formulating this problem. Whatever is not transcended
rots, and whatever is rotten cries out for transcendence. Spurious
opposition, being unaware of both these tendencies, speeds up the
process of decomposition while becoming an integral part of it: it
thus makes the task of transcendence easier=FEbut only in the sense
in which we sometimes say of a murdered man that he made his
murderer's task easier. Survival is non-transcendence become
unlivable. The mere rejection of survival dooms us to impotence. We
have to retrieve the core of radical demands which has repeatedly
been renounced by movements which started out as revolutionary
(eighteen).
Capitalism has demystified survival. It has made the poverty of
daily life intolerable in view of the increasing wealth of
technical possibilities. Survival has become an economizing on
life. The civilization of collective survival increases the dead
time in individual lives to the point where the death forces are
liable to carry the day over collective survival itself. The only
hope is that the passion for destruction may be reconverted into a
passion for life.
Up until now people have merely complied with a system of world-
transformation. Today the task is to make the system comply with
the transformation of the world.
The organization of human societies has changed the world, and the
world in changing has brought upheaval to the organization of human
societies. But if hierarchical organization seizes control of
nature, while itself undergoing transformation in the court of this
struggle, the portion of liberty and creativity falling to the lot
of the individual is drained away by the requirements of adaptation
to social norms of various kinds. This is true, at any rate, so
long as no generalized revolutionary moment occurs.
The time belonging to the individual in history is for the most
part dead time. Only a rather recent awakening of consciousness has
made this fact intolerable to us. For with its revolution the bour-
geoisie does two things. On the one hand, it proves that people can
accelerate world transformation, and that they can improve their
individual lives (where improvement is understood in terms of
accession to the ruling class, to riches, to capitalist success).
But at the same time the bourgeois order nullifies the individual's
freedom by interference; it increases the dead time in daily life
(imposing the need to produce, consume, calculate); and it
capitulates before the haphazard laws of the market, before the
inevitable cyclical crises with their burden of wars and misery,
and before the limitations invented by ``common sense'' (``You
can't change human nature,'' ``The poor will always be with us'',
etc.). The politics of the bourgeoisie, as of the bourgeoisie's
socialist heirs, is the politics of a driver pumping the brake
while the accelerator is jammed fast to the floor: the more the
speed increases, the more frenetic, perilous and useless become the
attempts to slow down. The helter-skelter pace of consumption is
set at once by the rate of the disintegration of Power and by the
imminence of the construction of a new order, a new dimension, a
parallel universe born of the collapse of the Old World.
The changeover from the aristocratic system of adaptation to the
``democratic'' one brutally widened the gap between the passivity
of individual submission and the social dynamism that transforms
nature=FEthe gap between people's powerlessness and the power of new
techniques. The contemplative attitude was perfectly suited to the
feudal system, to a virtually motionless world underpinned by
eternal gods. But the spirit of submission was hardly compatible
with the dynamic vision of merchants, manufacturers, bankers and
discoverers of riches=FEthe vision of those acquainted not with the
revelation of the immutable, but rather with the shifting economic
world, the insatiable hunger for profit and the necessity of
constant innovation. Yet wherever the bourgeoisie's action results
in the popularization and valorization of the sense of transience,
the sense of hope, the bourgeoisie qua power seeks to imprison
people within this transitoriness. To replace the old theology of
stasis the bourgeoisie sets up a metaphysics of motion. Although
both these ideological systems hinder the movement of reality, the
earlier one does so more successfully and more harmoniously than
the second: the aristocratic scheme is more consistent, more
unified. For to place an ideology of change in the service of what
does not change creates a paradox which nothing henceforward can
either conceal from consciousness or justify to consciousness. Thus
in our universe of expanding technology and comfort we see people
turning in upon themselves, shrivelling up, living trivial lives
and dying for details. It is a nightmare where we are promised
absolute freedom but granted a miserable square inch of individual
autonomy=FEa square inch, moreover, that is strictly policed by our
neighbors. A space-time of pettiness and mean thoughts.
Before the bourgeois revolution, the possibility of death in a
living God lent everyday life an illusory dimension which aspired
to the fullness of a multifaceted reality. You might say that
humanity has never come closer to self-realization while yet con-
fined to the realm of the inauthentic. But what is one to say of a
life lived out in the shadow of a God that is dead: the decomposing
God of fragmented power? The bourgeoisie has dispensed with a God
by economizing on people's lives. It has also made the economic
sphere into a sacred imperative and life into an economic system.
This is the model that our future programmers are preparing to
rationalize, to submit to proper planning=FEin a word, to
``humanize.'' And, never fear, they will be no less irresponsible
than the corpse of God.
Kierkegaard describes survival sickness well: ``Let others bemoan
the maliciousness of their age. What irks me is its pettiness, for
ours is an age without passion...My life comes out all one color."
Survival is life reduced to bare essentials, to life's abstract
form, to the minimum of activity required to ensure people's
participation in production and consumption. The entitlement of a
Roman slave was rest and sustenance. As beneficiaries of the Rights
of Man we receive the wherewithal to nourish and cultivate
ourselves, enough consciousness to play a role, enough initiative
to acquire power and enough passivity to flaunt Power's insignia.
Our freedom is the freedom to adapt after the fashion of higher
animals.
Survival is life in slow motion. How much energy it takes to
remain on the level of appearances! The media gives wide currency
to a whole personal hygiene of survival: avoid strong emotions,
watch your blood pressure, eat less, drink in moderation only,
survive in good health so that you can continue playing your role.
``Overwork: the executive's disease,'' said a recent headline in Le
Monde. We must be economical with survival for it wears us down; we
have to live it as little as possible for it belongs to death. In
former times one died a live death, one quickened by the presence
of God. Today our respect for life prohibits us from touching it,
reviving it or snapping it out of its lethargy. We die of inertia,
whenever the charge of death that we carry with us reaches
saturation point. Unfortunately there is no branch of science that
can measure the intensity of the deadly radiation that kills our
daily actions. In the end, by dint of identifying ourselves with
what we are not, of switching from one role to another, from one
authority to another, and from one age to another, how can we avoid
becoming ourselves part of that never-ending state of transition
which is the process of decomposition?
The presence within life itself of a mysterious yet tangible death
so misled Freud that he postulated an ontological curse in the
shape of a ``death instinct.'' This mistake of Freud's, which Reich
had already pointed out, has now been clarified by the phenomenon
of consumption. The three aspects of the death instinct=FENirvana,
the repetition compulsion and masochism=FEhave turned out to be
simply three styles of domination: constraint passively accepted,
seduction through conformity to custom, and mediation perceived as
an ineluctable law.
As we know, the consumption of goods=FEwhich comes down always, in
the present state of things, to the consumption of power=FEcarries
within itself the seeds of its own destruction and the conditions
of its own transcendence. The consumer cannot and must not ever
attain satisfaction: the logic of the consumable object demands the
creation of fresh needs, yet the accumulation of such false needs
exacerbates the malaise of people confined with increasing diffi-
culty solely to the status of consumers. Furthermore, the wealth of
consumer goods impoverishes authentic life. It does so in two ways.
First, it replaces authentic life with things. Secondly, it makes
it impossible, with the best will in the world, to become attached
to these things, precisely because they have to be consumed, i.e.,
destroyed. Whence an absence of life which is ever more frustrat-
ing, a self-devouring dissatisfaction. This need to live is
ambivalent: it constitutes one of those points where perspective is
reversed.
ln the consumer's manipulated view of things=FEthe view of
conditioning=FEthe lack of life appears as insufficient consumption
of power and insufficient self-consumption in the service of power.
As a palliative to the absence of real life we are offered death on
an instalment plan. A world that condemns us to a bloodless death
is naturally obliged to propagate the taste for blood. Where
survival sickness reigns, the desire to live lays hold
spontaneously of the weapons of death: senseless murder and sadism
flourish. For passion destroyed is reborn in the passion for
destruction. If these conditions persist, no one will survive the
era of survival. Already the despair is so great that many people
would go along with the Antonin Artaud who said: "l bear the stigma
of an insistent death that strips real death of all terror for me."
The individual of survival is inhabited by pleasure-anxiety, by
unfulfillment: a mutilated person. Where is one to find oneself in
the endless self-loss into which everything draws one? They are
wanderers in a labyrinth with no center, a maze full of mazes.
Theirs is a world of equivalents. Should one kill oneself? Killing
oneself, though, implies some sense of resistance: one must possess
a value that one can destroy. Where there is nothing, the
destructive actions themselves crumble to nothing. You cannot hurl
a void into a void. ``If only a rock would fall and kill me,''
wrote Kierkegaard, ``at least that would be an expedient.'' I doubt
if there is anyone today who has not been touched by the horror of
a thought such as that. Inertia is the surest killer, the inertia
of people who settle for senility at eighteen, plunging eight hours
a day into degrading work and feeding on ideologies. Beneath the
miserable tinsel of the spectacle there are only gaunt figures
yearning for, yet dreading, Kierkegaard's ``expedient,'' so that
they might never again have to desire what they dread and dread
what they desire.
At the same time the passion for life emerges as a biological
need, the reverse side of the passion for destroying and letting
oneself be destroyed. ``So long as we have not managed to abolish
any of the causes of human despair we have no right to try and
abolish the means whereby people attempt to get rid of despair.''
The fact is that people possess both the means to eliminate the
causes of despair and the power to mobilize these means in order to
rid themselves of it. No one has the right to ignore the fact that
the sway of conditioning accustoms them to survive on one hundredth
of their potential for life. So general is survival sickness that
the slightest concentration of lived experience could not fail to
unite the largest number of people in a common will to live. The
negation of despair would of necessity become the construction of
a new life. The rejection of economic logic (which only economizes
on life) would of necessity entail the death of economics and carry
us beyond the realm of survival.
The complete text of the Left Bank/Rebel Press edition of Raoul
Vaneigem's Revolution of Everyday Life is now out of print. We hope
to have copies of the upcoming new edition available from C.A.L.
(POB 1446, Columbia, MO. 65205-1446) for $12.00 postpaid later this
fall.